CIWIC/DMAC: An Ecology of
Influence at Columbia College Chicago

Ryan Trauman and
Ames
Hawkins

Introduction:
After CIWIC/DMAC: Re-, Me-, We-,
and
E-Cologies

This collaboratively written multi-modal compositon offers a relatively bounded landscape for which we employ the ecology metaphor as an analytical lens. The authors of this piece gathered around a dining room table and compared recollections, insights, and best practices we have adopted since each of us attended CIWIC/DMAC. Following a recording of this two-hour conversation, each of us was tasked with producing a text conveying our individual insights either from our first-hand experiences at CIWIC/DMAC or take-aways from our common conversation.

Anyone who has been to CIWIC/DMAC knows that much of the conversation considers the student as focus for the implementation of technopedagogies in the classroom. Instead, our pieces focus on CIWIC/DMAC’s influence on our own scholarly production and teaching praxes, as well as how those influences have impacted our local institution, as a way to feature/foreground our relationship to our experience at CIWIC/DMAC and, by extension, the relationships between and among each other via our longitudinal connection with the summer institute. Our texts collectively evidence rheto-technodiversity, a term we use to signify the idea of ecological interplay between and among different forms (multi-modal compositional species, if you will) and perspectives represented via the six pieces presented here.

Our individual pieces share three interdependent themes that reflect how each of our experiences lives within our institutional context or environment and might be considered a wecology as a collective text: openness, messiness, and hospitality.

Openness and an insider-outsider dynamic are notions that all of our texts address in some way. Most notably, Ames sets the stage and opens the conversation, if you will, with her video composition that contemplates the discourse and politics of openness in education, democracy, text production, and relationships. The piece at once celebrates and questions the cracks, holes, apertures and movement that must be present in order to not be closed, fixed, solid, stable. Jonn’s and Corrine’s pieces step knowingly into that gap, contemplating the personal and institutional anxiety over destabilization and the resistance or aggression one might experience facing a potentially disruptive composing practice.

Trauman’s audio remix acknowledges but recuperates the anxiety of destabilization through an exploration of messiness as fecundity, or a fertile soil, in which experimentation and divergence can lead to growth via the happy accidents that bring environmental pressure and cross-pollination together to drive evolution.

Teaching or composing practices do not exist in a bell jar. Environment impacts the growth potential of any ecology. As such, a third component of our wecology considers the role that hospitality plays in negotiating the stress that is required for creation. Suzanne calls for more “generous, hospitable environment[s]” as a way for each of us to serve as what Corrine describes as “a gateway rather than a gate keeper.” In her concluding essay Pegeen argues for a “radical hospitality” as a way of “upending traditional top-down” relationships between students, teachers, colleagues, the initiated and un-initiated.

It is because of the interrelated, intertwined nature of these themes and the fact they emerge in varying degrees in all of the pieces presented here that we think these are the drivers, the key factors, through which CIWIC and DMAC have influenced the re-, me- we, and e-cologies of Columbia College Chicago.

Ames Hawkins

OPEN: An Aperture
in Four Parts

This video
essay, in four parts, presents Ames
Hawkins’ scholarly-creative
interpretation of open/openness, an
oft-repeated term during the six-person
conversation this past Spring. Because
of the multi modal experimentation
included here, in the same way a reader
might need to slow down, and reread
sentences or paragraphs in order to
fully understand a complicated idea in
an alphabetic text, hitting pause and
rewinding the piece, in order to fully
read quotations, or perhaps reconsider
the different layers of text, sound and
image, is encouraged. Imagined,
conceived, and written by Ames Hawkins,
the piece was edited by her
sixteen-year old son, Charles Hawkins,
opening here also, a space for the
practice and possibility of
collaboration.

Suzanne Blum
Malley

Doing the Work of
CIWIC/DMAC

Building from
a frequency
analysis of the keywords used in the
Columbia College Chicago CIWIC/DMAC alumni
recorded conversations, Blum Malley uses video footage
produced as part of her "finger-exercises" (low-stakes assignments with digital tools) created during DMAC 2009, to explore the discomfort and
resistance that form a natural part
of using new composing tools
and the ways in which the CIWIC/DMAC learning environment
productively ameliorates those
responses.

Corrine
Calice

On Being an Early
Adopter

This short whiteboard animation reflects on the
experience of being an early adopter of computer-infused pedagogies who has
played the role of an invasive species, spurring the slow evolution and
diversification of an institutional ecology after attending CIWIC in 2000.
Using the concept of micro-aggression, a term typically reserved to explain
small, interpersonal gestures of rejection, the author explores complex power
dynamics in simple, easy to visualize examples of institutional anxiety such as
obstructionism and benign neglect that eventually grow toward faculty
empowerment and collaboration across the institution. The presentation suggests
that persistent individual faculty innovation has the capacity to contribute to
institutional culture change over time. As a part-time faculty member who
crossed the water from academia into the corporate training sector just after
starting to teach at Columbia College Chicago in 2004, Corrine chose to compose
her presentation as a white board animation to help illustrate the range of
professional and pedagogical practices among the CCC faculty. Simply hit play to
view.

Jonn
Salovaara

In planning a
project to explore and honor his experience at DMAC 2009, Jonn
Salovaara started with a series of
photos and by thinking of their
sidewalk cracks in terms of “What
might grow, given a little space?”
This question derived from Cindy
Selfe’s warning about the restriction
of our effectiveness as teachers if we
“limit the bandwidth of composing
modalities in our classrooms and
assignments” (“The Breath of Air” p.
618). Salovaara wanted to focus on the
effectiveness that actually does
develop when we attempt to widen that
bandwidth, even a little bit.

After the discussion with CWIC-DMAC
colleagues, and in interacting with
words suggested by the images, this all
switched. His work became a more
introspective re-discovery of what had
actually occurred for his own
multi-modal composing and teaching
since DMAC.

The resulting personal narrative of
attempts and setbacks intentionally
flows in and out of pure text slides
and image/text slides. On the latter,
readers are invited to spend more time
than it takes to read the brief texts,
considering the relationship between
the text and the image.

Ultimately, Salovaara reached a
hypothesis that, to be effective,
instructors themselves need to keep
composing multi-modally, and that
writing programs might take some steps
to encourage them in this.

Slideshow/Movie by Jonn
Salovaara

A More Academic Afterword

Gail Hawisher and Cindy Selfe (2014)
provide a developed perspective on the
growing possibilities for digital
multi-modal publishing, reviewing the
history of scholarly digital publishing
and arguing for the likelihood of its
increasing role in the future. They
also point out that, “With the changing
set of challenges that face digital
publishing, educating composition
scholars to compose only alphabetic
texts (or to analyze them, assess them,
or circulate them) is a disservice. We
will all need to read and compose and
exchange new kinds of texts, and our
changing scholarship will demand new
mediated genres” (p. 111).

Douglas Eyman and Cheryl Ball (2014)
point out the benefits to the composer
of publishing digital work. They focus
on the deeper sense of design and
rhetoric that develop as a result of
such publishing. “For born-digital
webtexts that engage multiple modes and
media as a function of their genre,
additional rhetorical concerns arise
with regard to decisions about
delivery, access(ability), and
sustainability” (p. 114).

WPAs intent on multi-modal instruction
might do well to highlight these
scholarly publishing trends and
benefits to all of their instructors. I
think they might also consider the more
expressive, less academic multi-modal
work that some instructors engage in.
They might promote this kind of work,
by suggesting venues for non-academic
publishing that as closely as possible
approximate the conditions that Eyman
and Ball describe for the academic.
These include “(pedagogically
informed) mentorship of authors in
pre-submission collaborations and [a]
collaborative peer review process”(p.
115). Again, WPAs might also create
in-house sites for publishing and
sharing multi-modal digital work, that
also approximate these conditions.

In some of the discussion related to
this issue in computers and writing,
for instance in an article like
“Teaching Digital Rhetoric,” there has
been the unspoken assumption that
instructors are already engaged, at the
very least, in encountering new
interfaces or media. This may be a
fair assumption if the course is called
Digital Rhetoric, but it may be a bit
hasty if the program is a more general
writing and rhetoric course.

As we began to consider toward the end
of our CWIC/DMAC discussion, in the
case of a more general course, current
instructors may range from the
digitally adept, to the would-be
Luddite and everything in between.
And, even with the digitally more
adept, there is presumably a range of
truly multi-modal experience, since
some digital work may be almost
exclusively text while other digital
work may be in non-text modes, but one
at a time, rather than in combination.

This wide spectrum of familiarity with
the multi-modal is suggested in the
section on Faculty Development in the
webtext by Sherry Rankins-Robertson, et
al. “Several of the teachers brought
into the course were new to multimodal
composing and had not previously
assessed multimodal assignments.
Additionally, several of the teachers
were limited in their abilities to
develop instructional texts outside of
print-based documents.” Their solution
in helping faculty was one-on-one
sessions in teaching faculty to use
unfamiliar modes and the course
technology. The other strategy that I
propose, of helping faculty to ongoing
publication of their own multi-modal
work, though, is not mentioned here as
another ingredient in this faculty
development.

It may be that in addition to helping
faculty cope with the immediate demands
of a multi-modal curriculum, in the
long run, programs needs to consider
this other ingredient. Rather than
guessing the multi-modal experience of
faculty, and developing help based on
those guesses, the promotion of their
work in digital multi-modal composition
and publishing may require one-on-one
consultation and a battery of
publishing possibilities to meet the
instructors where they are and help
them forward with their own multi-modal
composing and publishing, and, thereby,
their teaching.

Image below by Ryan
Trauman

Ryan Trauman

A Mess of
Influences

In conceiving of this individual piece of our larger
overall text, I knew that I wanted to focus on the messiness, the confusion, the
trepidation, and the chaos that were all, at various times, present over the
course of each of the DMAC institutes in which I taught or facilitated. For six
consecutive summers I had the privilege of encountering a new cohort of scholars
and graduate students. That repetition rendered several insights about the sorts
of environments and attitudes that foster skilled praxis with digital writing
tools. Of course, repeated practice, rhetorical awareness, and patience are what
most people learn as the fundamentals of working within a learning environment
like CIWIC/DMAC. However, a more subtle, but no less central or necessary
element is the messiness holding the chaos together.

Like the other individual pieces of our text, this audio text focuses on themes
of openness, messiness, and hospitality. Not only does the text examine these
themes as organizing content, but it also directly enacts them as well. As
contradictory as it might seem, there is a strong correlation between openness
and intimacy. While it is possible that our published text might find a
receptive public audience amongst computers and writing scholars, the opening
conversation took place in a much more intimate environment. The heavy wood
dining room table we gathered around fostered a sense of intimacy and openness
about our teaching and writing practices. There was an overt sense of
hospitality as we gathered in our colleagues' home, but there were also two
other types of hospitality at work. One is the sort of hospitality present for
any conversation to work, especially as that conversation gathers more people.
To be one conversant among six takes respect and patience, an openness to
others' ideas and the hospitality to make room for them, to listen to them, and
to respond. But there was another hospitality present, too. Not only was the
conversation lively and rich, but each of us knew that we were contributing our
voices to an audio recording of the evening. We all agreed that each of us was
free to use that recording as source material for our individual texts. The more
I reflect on that, the more I've come to realize just how much trust and
hospitality that required from each of us.

Pegeen Reichert
Powell

Welcome to my
Home/Page: Radical Hospitality in
Program Administration and Course
Design

In Fall 2005, the
Writing in Digital Environments (or
WIDE)
Research
Center Collective published an article
in Kairos titled “Why
teach digital writing?” Just by their
participation in CIWIC or DMAC, my
colleagues (and co-authors here) have
already responded to this question
with conviction, and what’s more, have
gone on to answer “How do we
teach digital writing?” and even “What
is digital writing?” As the only
contributor to this piece not
to have participated in CIWIC or
DMAC, at times I envy their conviction,
not to mention, their exciting,
thoughtful, substantial responses to
the questions.
On the other hand, it may be useful in
my role as the Director of the
Program in Writing and Rhetoric where
we all teach that I am still
asking the questions. In fact, I like
that WIDE titled their article as
an interrogative. It’s tempting to
think that almost a decade later, our
field has answered the question, the
WIDE collective
offered the article itself as a kind of
answer, but the title—in
bibliographies and indexes—will forever
remain a question, and I argue
that’s as it should be.

As a program, the questions we ask, the
questions themselves—not just
why teach digital writing, but
also how, and even more
fundamentally, what is digital
writing—should remain at the
center of our work. And I suggest that
we might use the metaphor of
hospitality as a guide for our work in
this era of questions.

KEEPING QUESTIONS AT THE CENTER OF
OUR WORK

First, though, why would we want to
keep questions at the center of our
curriculum, pedagogy, and WPA work? An
easy point—probably too easy—is
that it may be simply hubris to believe
that we will soon find durable
answers to the questions about the
nature of writing in the
21st century. The pace of
change is enough to quell our
optimism that we could define, even
temporarily, what digital writing is
and how we should teach it.

But it’s more than just the pace of
change that should give us pause,
that should make us wonder if we will
ever know what we’re doing again,
but also the scope of the change.
Everything about the very
nature of writing is up in the air:
genre conventions, the relationship
between authors and readers, the role
and look of alphabetic text, how
writing is circulated, the technologies
and platforms used to produce
and consume writing, even the social
purposes to which we put writing.
It is hubris to believe that we can say
to our various constituents
(students, parents, colleagues, the
public) that we have the answers to
the questions of why and how, when the
what of digital writing
remains in constant flux.

Another reason our particular program
needs to take these questions
seriously, even when individual
colleagues have answered them
brilliantly already, is because many of
our instructors—our most
experienced and some of our best—have
barely even begun to raise these
issues in their teaching. As our
program moves toward a curriculum that
embraces the challenge and potential of
teaching digital, multimodal
composition, a process we are just
beginning, we must treat these
questions with the respect they are due
as part of the pedagogical
process of introducing the new
curriculum to our instructors. Asking
these questions sincerely with our
instructors, as opposed to providing
them answers, invites them to
participate in the process of making
this
important shift in our learning
outcomes and curriculum.

So we should keep the questions at the
center of our work because it’s
hubris not to and because they play an
important part in the curriculum
revision process. However, reminding
ourselves of what we don’t know and
what we can’t control also,
paradoxically perhaps, reflects some of
the
best current thinking about digital
rhetorics.

ACKNOWLEDGING THE CONTINGENCIES OF
DIGITAL RHETORIC

David Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and
Anthony J. Michel (2012), in their very
useful
book, The Available Means of
Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and
Pedagogy of Multimodal Public
Rhetoric, argue that rhetorical
success “is contingent upon networks of
human and nonhuman actors,
including multiple semiotic modes and
multiple media of production,
reproduction, and distribution. These
networks can be complex,
unpredictable, and chaotic” (p.11).
They argue what what we know intuitively
when we consider their 36 simultaneous
ratios, that we have very
little control over our rhetorical
success. Part of their project in
this book is to trouble the notion of
agency: “all rhetorical action is
contingent on many factors beyond the
control of the various human
actors involved” (p. 107). They don’t
dismiss the concept of agency
altogether, but we are far beyond a
time when we could teach students to
analyze their intended audience and
simply employ the appeals that will
be most persuasive for that audience.
“One thing is certain,” Sheridan,
Ridolfo, and Michel argue, and that is
that “agency is not increased by
pretending that rhetorical action
transcends contingency” (p. 72).

Henry Jenkins and his coauthors (2013)
in Spreadable Media are also
concerned about the concept of agency,
but they complicate our work as
writing instructors in a different way,
by highlighting the agency of
audiences to share and repurpose the
work of online compositions. They
contrast their metaphor of
“spreadability” to a stickiness model
of
media production and distribution. A
stickiness model, they explain,
“refers to the need to create content
that attracts audience attention
and engagement,” not unlike our old
“analyze your intended audience and
write to them” assignments (p. 4). In a
stickiness model, it is clear who
the producer and the audience is; “each
performs a separate and distinct
purpose” (p. 7). However, “In a
spreadable model, there is not only an
increased collaboration across these
roles but, in some cases, a
blurring of the distinctions between
these roles” (p. 7). Audience becomes
author, but not in ways that the
original producer of the content has
any real control over.

RESISTING ANSWERS

I think it’s clear, though we may often
forget, that none of this is
really new: the inherent contingencies
in the rhetorical situation, the
blurring of the roles of author and
audience, these were always there.
Our pedagogical models up to this point
simply obscured these facts,
stabilizing the rhetorical situation
long enough to assign a grade: we
were the audience of one for our
students’ writing, the circulation
method was no more complicated than
making sure the printer had paper
and you showed up to class in time to
hand it in. And we can still teach
that way.

However, when we acknowledge not just
how fast and how drastically the
nature of writing is changing outside
of our classroom, but also how
little agency any of us have as writers
over our compositions, then we
are left with those questions at the
center of our work: what is it that
we’re trying to teach, when it appears
that we have very little agency
over our rhetorical success anyway? And
how does one teach a lack of
agency? And the why tends to emerge as
why teach this—when it seems
almost impossible to do so—when we
could just keep asking students to
write essays, print them on paper, and
hand them in?

I’m not suggesting that we leave these
dilemmas in the form of
questions—I’m suggesting that we resist
the attempt to pin down the
answers. That we keep asking the
questions over and over, and wonder at
the different answers we might hear
from ourselves and our colleagues
and our students.

HOSPITALITY IN COMPOSITION
STUDIES

I argue that the concept of
hospitality, and specifically Derrida’s
concept of absolute or unconditional
hospitality, can function as a
metaphor for our work that enables us
to imagine a response to the
unknowns and the things we can’t
control in our work these days.
Hospitality emerged as an important
theme in the conversation among my
colleagues who attended CIWIC and DMAC.
They spoke of Cindy Selfe’s
hospitality, of the hospitable spaces
in which they worked, and of the
hospitality of the community of
scholars that has grown from these
shared experiences. What would it mean
to recreate that kind of
hospitality in a program? And should
that even be our goal?

I think we’ve always imagined
composition studies to be a hospitable
discipline, or at least much of what
we’ve done has attempted to
generate hospitality. Janis Haswell,
Richard Haswell, and Glenn Blalock
(2009),
however, appear to have written the
only scholarship in our field that
addresses the idea of hospitality. In
“Hospitality in College
Composition Courses,” they offer a
compelling argument for taking
seriously the “pragmatic and ethical
implications of [hospitality]” in
the writing classroom, if not the
theoretical underpinnings of the
concept (p. 709). Hospitality assumes
borders—of homes, of countries.
Likewise, writing classrooms have
always been understood as liminal
spaces, because of the literal and
metaphorical borders we cross—the
doorway of the classroom; the
relationship among disciplines; the
borders among home, work, and school.
Hospitality as a metaphor captures
those border-crossings and compels us
to think about how we respond to
those people and ideas that enter our
institutions and classrooms.

DERRIDA AND THE PARADOX OF
HOSPITALITY

However, Derrida (2009) challenges our
understanding of hospitality. He
identifies a paradox implicit in the
traditional understanding of
hospitality: the generosity we
associate with hospitality in fact
entails sovereignty over one's home and
the exertion of power by the
host to choose who enters. He argues
that there is a kind of violence
associated with hospitality as the
other enters the host’s territory on
the terms established by the host. And
relevant to our own work, Derrida
explains this violence as a violence
embedded in language:

The foreigner is first of
all foreign to the legal language
in which the duty of hospitality is
formulated. . . .He has to ask for
hospitality in a language which by
definition is not his own, the one
imposed on him by the master of the
house, the host, the king, the lord,
the authorities, the nation, the State,
the father, etc. [We can hear in
this list the idea that the language is
imposed on him by the teacher,
too.] This personage imposes on him
translation into their own language,
and that’s the first act of violence. .
. If he was already speaking our
language, with all that that implies,
if we already shared everything
that is shared with a language, would
the foreigner still be a foreigner
and could we speak of asylum or
hospitality in regard to him?
(pp. 15-17)

And that is the paradox of hospitality,
that we must exert violence in
order to generously extend hospitality.

So Derrida elaborates an absolute or
unconditional hospitality. He
argues that:

Absolute hospitality
requires that I open up my home and
that I give not only to the foreigner.
. .but to the absolute, unknown,
anonymous other, and that I give place
to them, that I let them come,
that I let them arrive, and take place
in the place I offer them,
without asking of them either
reciprocity (entering into a pact) or
even
their names. (p.
25)

Unconditional hospitality radically
decenters the host, and hospitality
is no longer about the social
conventions of welcoming, but about new
arrivals confronting the host with
otherness. It is hospitality on the
terms established by the guest. Borders
are crossed with impunity.

HOSPITALITY AND DIGITAL
COMPOSITION

Hospitality, and especially Derrida’s
radical hospitality, is a
particularly apt metaphor as we move
toward digital composition. First,
digital, multimodal texts have borders
that readers cross with impunity.
The ubiquitous “welcome to my homepage”
message may in fact be a message
of absolute hospitality, because the
writer/host of networked, digital
texts no longer controls who enters,
how long they stay, what rooms they
go in, even what they do when they get
there. We must appreciate that
guests to our online texts may borrow
our stuff, and even change it
drastically in the borrowing.

Moreover, the Internet has no
boundaries. Derrida meditates on the
implications for this and state
surveillance, which is also relevant to
our concerns, but for now I’m just
going to limit it to his observation
that our “at home” is threatened (p.
51). Traditional hospitality is very
clear about the boundaries of home, of
country. But the boundaries of
the classroom become blurred, or erased
altogether, anytime a student
enters the classroom with a phone
connected to the outside (which is to
say, every time a student enters our
classroom). Derrick Mueller’s (2009)
concept of digital underlife is
relevant here. He argues that “we have
observed an unprecedented unraveling of
presumably once-ordered domains
of the classroom and conference hall”
(p. 240). But rather than lock the
doors to reestablish a sense of order,
he suggests that

When weighing decisions
about what to do about digital
underlife, we must take on a more
receptive [more hospitable?] attitude
to the plausibility of its productive
dimensions. That is, rather than
reducing digital underlife into the
dyad of contained and disruptive, we
might add productive as a positive
third term—particularly where we
understand such underlife to enable
meaningful discursive practices
beyond the schoolroom.

(p.
209)
In other words, the very nature of the
writing and reading that our
students are already doing, in
our classroom if not always
of our classroom, demands an
absolute hospitality on our part.

THE CHALLENGE OF HOSPITALITY

But I’m not sure yet that we have
embraced the new role of host that
this implies. Claudia W. Ruitenberg
(2011), who applies Derrida’s ethic of
absolute hospitality to education,
argues that a hospitable curriculum
“asks how it can give place to, or
would be undone by, the arrival of
new ideas—for new ideas do not
necessarily sit comfortably in the
existing home of the curriculum” (p.
34).

Which brings me back to the questions
at the center of digital writing:
why teach it, how do we teach it, what
is it? Keeping these questions as
questions, without forcing answers,
encourages us to assume the role of
the host of a radical, absolute
hospitality. When we sincerely ask
these
questions, we are compelled to be open
to new ideas, new approaches, new
languages. It means seeing whatever
answers we arrive at as provisional.
And it means listening to the answers
provided by students, colleagues
in other disciplines, and faculty in
our program who we may not
typically turn to for answers,
including those who are at first
resistant to the shift toward digital
composition. In fact,
intentionally building the questions
into our curriculum provides a
model for this openness to the unknown,
which can be productive as we
introduce these new ideas to resistant
instructors.

THE LIMITS OF THE METAPHOR OF
RADICAL HOSPITALITY

As useful as this metaphor may be,
however, how do we tell our
students—not to mention their parents,
our colleagues, the public—that
we don’t know what writing is? People
think they know what writing is,
and in some cases, they might actually
be correct. When we start arguing
for new curricula, or more technology,
as I’m doing at my institution,
the people we communicate with
generally aren’t persuaded by
questions.
Moreover, as a metaphor, traditional
hospitality is so good, so
knowable, so persuasive. In fact I came
to this project with memories of
my own mother’s hospitality, all the
strange people (they weren’t
strangers necessarily, but they were
very weird) at our Christmas
breakfast, the kids and adults who
lived with us at various times.
Hospitality in this sense is a real
virtue and powerfully persuasive.
Hospitality in the way I’m talking
about it is not, because the radical
host is no longer in a position to
offer a welcome on his or her own
terms—this is hospitality on the terms
of the guest. It might not be a
strong metaphor when the traditional
view of hospitality holds such
persuasive appeal.
Moreover, do the questions really help
us talk about what it is that we
do know? And we do know a lot—we have a
vocabulary, a methodology,
habits of mind—that enable us, as
scholars in our fields, to study and
teach writing. More than anything,
right now, I see the metaphor of
radical hospitality as a challenge to
us to articulate what it is we do
know, and what it is we don’t yet know.

AN HOSPITABLE CURRICULUM: WHAT IS
WRITING IN THE 21st
CENTURY?

Our program is currently piloting a
course deliberately titled with a
question, “What is Writing in the
21st Century?” This course,
the first in a sequence of two
first-year courses, moves the program
from a typical curriculum that taught
primarily print-based academic
genres to a curriculum structured
around ten key rhetorical concepts
rearticulated in light of digital,
multimodal composition. Not to be
confused with “threshold concepts” (see
Baillie, Bowden, and Meyer (2013)),
instead these terms might be better
understood as strategies for
navigating the world of multimodal
communication as readers and writers:
affordances, alphabetic text,
arrangement, circulation, ethos, field,
genre, image, kairos, and remix.
Maintaining a focus on new iterations
of traditional rhetorical concepts
codifies disciplinary knowledge and
values—acknowledging what it is we do
know—and at the same time, enables
us to explore what we don’t know.

For example, one of the key concepts is
ethos, not a new
concept in writing courses.
Nevertheless, in the context of
digital,
networked writing, we must address how
ethos is constructed not just in
words, but in all decisions that go
into composing. The images (another
key concept in the course), music,
audio, fonts, colors, video, and the
arrangement (yet another key concept)
of these various pieces, all
contribute to one’s ethos, as do the
platforms and media one uses to
circulate such compositions. If
students are to practice constructing a
positive ethos in this environment,
then they must have the opportunity
to create a multimodal text and
experiment with various social media
and
platforms. What the course offers,
then, is a relatively durable body of
knowledge, captured in our key
concepts, that enables us to practice
with, theorize, and question the
rapidly shifting, almost ephemeral
communicative resources and
technologies, circulation methods, and
social purposes that characterize our
communication landscape now. (Put
simply, we’re teaching ethos instead of
Facebook, circulation instead of
Twitter, arrangement instead of
YouTube.)

We are asking our students and each
other “What is writing in the
21st century?” and using our
key concepts as a way to frame
partial, necessarily provisional
answers. Arguably, writing scholars have
always been investigating the nature of
writing, but we are in an
historical moment when the urgency of
this question is felt keenly by
scholars in our field, and by other
academics and the general public. We
are unsure of the responses we’ll get,
in the form of students’ projects
or our instructors’ course designs, and
we anticipate that the responses
may evolve over several semesters,
which may in turn shape future
iterations of the course. If, as
Ruitenberg (2011) says, an ethic of
hospitality entails that “the arrival
of the guest may change the space
into which he or she is received” (p.
32), then in the spirit of such
hospitality, those of us who have
designed the course—including past
participants in CIWIC and DMAC—are
opening ourselves up to ideas and
approaches that will likely change the
course, and possibly even our
understanding of our discipline, in
ways we couldn’t imagine now.